Cannot activate LVs in VG pve while PVs appear on duplicate devices

[eyeofnewt]

Hi, first time caller - please be gentle and thank you for you help

I've been playing with Proxmox for a couple of months, but recently after an unexpected power outage the host no longer boots - and I'm stuck at initramfs. I presume something has been updated that only came into effect after the reboot.

Since installed Proxmox using defaults, it always used to warn me:

WARNING: Not using device /dev/sdb3 for PV long-string-of-characters.
WARNING: PV long-string-of-characters prefers device name /dev/sda3 because device name matches previous.
Cannot activate LVs in VG pve while PVs appear on duplicate devices.

But somehow the system would boot anyway. But now it times out and drops to initramfs. You guys are my last hope before rebuilding

 

[mira]

Did you install it on an iSCSI/FC storage with multiple paths?

 

[eyeofnewt]

No, it's a single Gen10 HPE Microserver with an onboard Marvel RAID controller, configured with two RAID 1 disk pairs. I 'think' I found a resolution to the problem by using a filter in lvm.conf and upgrading from 7.2 -> 7.3, but I don't understand what was wrong.

 

[mira]

Still, why do you have 2 disks with the exact same data and PVID?
In this case you'd have to use `multipath-tools-boot` and configure it accordingly so that it is available on boot.

 

[eyeofnewt]

Still, why do you have 2 disks with the exact same data and PVID?
In this case you'd have to use `multipath-tools-boot` and configure it accordingly so that it is available on boot.

I've no idea. All I've done to build the system is boot from USB and follow the wizard. Reading through past forum posts, maybe the onboard RAID is doing something funky. As I say, the boot error disappeared after upgrading to 7.3. Prior to that I noticed that if I booted from the 7.3 install USB and dropped to a shell lvm would report the same errors, but on next reboot (with the USB removed) the system would fully boot with warnings about the duplicates.

 

[mira]

Yes, pretty sure it is the RAID controller doing that.
But still, with duplicate PVs you could always run into issues where the VG (and in turn the LVs) cannot be activated.

So I'd suggest looking into setting up multipath-tools-boot or configuring your RAID controller to not provide multiple paths.